Square Matrices - Problem 3

Norm Prokup

Let's multiply some 3 by 3 matrices. I've got three of them here; a, b and a special one i. Notice that i has 1's down the diagonal and everything else is 0.

Let's compute 8 times i. Remember we go across the row of the left matrix, down the column of the right. I'm going to get 3 plus 0 plus 0, 3. I'm going to get 0 plus 2 plus 0, 2. I'm going to get 0 plus 0 plus 6, 6. 1 plus 0 plus 0, 1. 0 plus 1 plus 0, 1. 0 plus 0 plus 2, 2. 2 plus 0 plus 0, 0 plus 2 plus 0 and finally 0 plus 0 plus 5. Notice that multiplying matrix a by this matrix i, give us the very same matrix a. This is matrix a all over again. This is called the identity matrix.

What makes the identity matrix special, is if you multiply it by another square matrix of the same order you get that matrix back again. It's like multiplying a real number by 1. We call this the identity matrix.

This is very interesting. This was matrix a and this was matrix b and I multiplied a by b and I got the identity matrix. We call be the inverse of a, it's kind of like multiplying a number by it's reciprocal. When you multiply 5 by it's reciprocal 1/5 you get 1. Which is the multiplicative identity of real numbers.

When you multiply a matrix by its inverse you get the multiplicative identity of matrix multiplication i.